A Life In Focus: Julia Margaret Cameron at the Met

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Anthony Lane writes about Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits, which are currently on view in a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in 1815, Cameron received her first camera as a gift, at the age of forty-eight, and her photographs immortalized her contemporaries, from luminaries like Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, and John Herschel to many of the women in her life—nieces, sisters, friends—who faced her lens as willing collaborators and have become icons in their own right. One of Cameron’s favorite muses was her niece Julia, the mother of Virginia Woolf.

Cameron, Lane writes, “conducted herself as if wishing to prove, to the relevant authorities, that a single lifetime was an insultingly brief span, in the light of all that needed and begged to be achieved.” If we believe, as she did, that “the history of the human face is a book we don’t tire of, if we can get its grand truths, & learn them by heart,” then the gift of a camera came to her just in time.

Below is a selection of Cameron’s photographs from the Met exhibit. Click on the red arrows for a full-screen view.

“Sappho” (1865). Mary Hillier, one of Cameron’s housemaids, is pictured.